Politkofsky (steam tug)


Politkofsky was a small Russian-built Imperial Russian Navy sidewheel gunboat that patrolled the Alaskan Panhandle in the 1860s.

For other ships with the same name, see USS Polly.

Politkofsky
History
Russia
Name: IRN Politkofsky
Launched: 1850s
Reclassified: Gunboat
Stricken: 1867
Fate: Sold with Russian Alaska in 1867
History
United States
Name: Polly
Acquired: by being sold
Reclassified: steamboat tugboat
Fate: 1906 lost on Yukon River

Politkofsky was built of yellow cedar in Russian America at New Archangel (now Sitka, Alaska), in the 1850s and was 120 feet (37 m) in length and of 152 tons displacement. She had early copper boilers and a crosshead steam engine taken from the Imperial Russian Navy ship Imperator Nikolai I. When Tsar Alexander II of Russia sold Russian Alaska to the United States in 1867, Politkofsky was included in the deal. The gunboat was then sold into civilian service as a tugboat.

As the tug Polly, the ship worked along the northwest coast of North America. During the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, she operated on the Yukon River, where she sank in 1906.


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